Anwar was sitting among his five brothers at the dining table. He had a few bites which had not sluiced down yet when he headed for the front door; hoping to enjoy a few hours of play under the warm winter sun. He looked ahead and saw his cousins Ahmed and Malak playing outside. The moment he stepped outside the door to join them, a missile from an Israeli reconnaissance craft ripped his body into pieces. His flowing blood mixed with the earth’s dust announcing his eternal absence.

The six year old Anwar, in his last moment before falling absent from mundane existence, used to keep a pencil and an eraser hidden from his mother hoping to find a stray scrap of paper to write a few words on. His mother says, “He used to carry a pencil and an eraser and a few scraps of paper wherever he went to use for writing. He was a source of light emanating with knowledge, ethics, morality and beauty.”

Anwar has gone, but his memory is still vivid in his mother’s mind making her heart throb fast. She says, “Never will I forget his insistence on studying by the candle light at times of war to be prepared for the exams which the war had interrupted. He used to carry with his small hands a small wooden table on which he put his books and notebooks. He used to study on his own with nobody asking him to do. If anybody objected to that and asked him to wait till the end of the war, he grew red in the face with anger and directed his speech to me saying ‘ Let’s read for the exam, Mum’ , so, I sat by him without reading a word as I was preoccupied with the war. Therefore, he would read alone; raising his voice while reading his lessons.”

Anwar was waiting for the flowers of his innocent dreams to blossom and show on his beautiful face. However, the occupation forces had denied him all. They quickly quashed his life and left his mother nothing but grieving over the painful memory of his departure which is still there with every heart beat.